The explosive true saga of the legendary adventurer Jedediah Smith and the Mountain Men who explored the American frontier, written by New York Times bestselling authors of Blood and Treasure Bob Drury and Tom Clavin. It is the early 19th century, and the land recently purchased by President Thomas Jefferson stretches west for thousands of miles. Who inhabits this vast new garden of Eden? What strange beasts and natural formations can be found? Thus was the birth of Manifest Destiny and the resulting bloody battles with Indigenous tribes encountered by white explorers. Also in this volatile mix are the grizzled fur trappers and mountain men, waging war against the Native American tribes whose lands they traverse. This is the setting of Throne of Grace, and the guide to this epic narrative is arguably America’s greatest yet most unsung pathfinder, Jedediah Smith. His explorations into the forested frontiers on both sides of the Rocky Mountains and all the way to the West Coast would become the stuff of legend. Thanks to painstaking research and riveting writing, the story of the making of modern America is told through the eyes of both the ordinary and memorable men and women, settlers and Indigenous, who witnessed it. But it's Smith who drives the narrative with his trailblazing path through the unexplored terrain of the American West. Throne of Grace is a gripping yarn that drops the reader into the center of an underreported era and introduces one of the great explorers in American history.

To weary travelers on the Oregon Trail during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Fort Laramie was a welcome sight. Its walls and flag-decked towers rose from the high plains, their solidity suggesting that the white man was gaining a toehold in the wilderness. Hafen and Young present the colorful history of Fort Laramie from its establishment as Fort John in 1834 to its abandonment in 1890. Early on, the fort was controlled by the American Fur Company and patronized by trappers like Jim Bridger and Kit Carson. Then it was a vital supply center and rest stop for a tide of emigrants--missionaries, Mormons, forty-niners, and homeseekers. As more wagons rolled west and the Pony Express came through, the need for protection increased; in 1849, Fort Laramie was converted from a trapper's post into a military fort. Down through the years there were skirmishes with the Plains Indians, who sometimes came to the fort to barter and to treat. The peace council of 1851--one of the largest gatherings of tribes ever seen in the Old West--is here described in fascinating detail. The cast of characters in this great historical pageant reads like a who's who of the American West.

From July to November 1833, Joseph R. Walker led a brigade of fifty-eight fur trappers, with two hundred horses and a year’s provisions, from the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming to the Pacific coast of central California. Toward the end of their journey the Walker brigade crossed the Sierra Nevada, becoming the first non-Native people to traverse the range from east to west. That crossing, made long and brutal by bewildering terrain and deep snow, is widely and rightly considered a milestone in the exploration of intermontane North America. Following Walker’s death in 1876, an alluring tale arose concerning his trans-Sierran route. In the course of the crossing, goes the story, Walker found himself on the northern rim of Yosemite Valley at the plungepoint of North America’s tallest waterfall, staring into the most awesome mountain chasm on the continent. Over the decades since then, this time-honored tale has hardened to folklore. Dozens of historical works have construed it as a towering moment in the opening of the West. But in fact this tale of Yosemite’s discovery has no basis or support in firsthand accounts of the 1833 Sierran crossing. Moreover, there is much in those accounts that contradicts Yosemite lore, and much that points to a trans-Sierran route well north of Yosemite Valley. In A Way Across the Mountain, Scott Stine reconstructs Walker’s 1833 route over the Sierra. Stine draws on his own intimate knowledge of the geomorphology, hydrography, biogeography, and climate of the Sierra Nevada and Great Basin, and employs the detailed travel narrative of the Walker brigade’s field clerk, Zenas Leonard. Stine documents the inception, growth, and persistence of the Yosemite Myth and explores the extent to which that lore has overshadowed Walker’s greatest discovery—that the huge swath of continent between the Wasatch Front and the Sierran crest is hydrographically closed, draining not to an ocean, but to salty lakes and desert sands.